Scaling urban tree cooling and its socioeconomic distribution

Urban greening with trees and other vegetation is gaining popularity as a means to benefit urban populations, particularly by mitigating heat exposure. At the same time, concerns about equity in the distribution of urban greenspaces and their benefits have become central to urban climate planning and research. A persistent challenge in the field is the trade-off between data accuracy and scale. Detailed, empirical ground data is typically only available for individual cities, whereas broader comparative or global analyses must rely on satellite data and extrapolated or heavily aggregated socioeconomic data. Here, we compare these approaches in the context of the socioeconomic distribution of urban tree-related cooling benefits. We derive multiple metrics using ground-based temperature measurements, satellite data, and census-based socioeconomic indicators. By benchmarking analyses based on broadly available datasets against those using detailed local measurements, we assess the extent to which large-scale, data-sparse approaches reproduce patterns observed in high-resolution ground data. Using several US and European cities as case studies, we then assess the spatial distribution of cooling effects in relation to socio-economic conditions of the neighbourhood. Our results provide guidance on the reliability and limitations of commonly used data sources for assessing equity in urban heat mitigation benefits across cities and regions.